This is a Recording

I distinctly recall seeing Jeffrey Daniel's famous 1982 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting 'A Night to Remember': which introduced "body-popping" to a fascinated British public. The song, and the three other hit singles that followed it ('I Can Make You Feel Good', 'There It Is' and 'Friends') were very often on the radio and TV that year - and I found them pleasant enough, but my musical attention (such as it was, when I glanced up from my new Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer) focussed more on the likes of Madness, Soft Cell, The Fun Boy Three, XTC and Yazoo. Why then should it be that on picking up a copy of Shalamar's Friends at a charity shop six months ago, seeing those song-titles in the track-listing should provoke such a heady surge of affectionate nostalgia? Snippets of the music began playing in my head, and I thought that for the £1 asking price it was well worth taking it home to see how I'd enjoy the album. I ...

I've always frowned on the practice of including two mixes of the same song on a 7" single; or worse, multiple versions on a 12" one. It's hardly ever happened that I want to listen to multiple arrangements of the same tune in succession. 'Manchild', Neneh Cherry's second 45 release, has 'Manchild (The Original Mix)' as its B-side. Not that it really matters, as I bought the record second-hand and very cheaply, and because I've always liked the song. Apparently one of Cherry's first attempts at songwriting, it's a poignant ballad with a memorable melody. Some voices have a certain something in their timbre which just sit right somehow in one's ear, and for me, hers is such a one. The lyrics, a sketched portrait of the titular character, fall in a way that leads me to try to puzzle out a narrative from them when I listen to the track. Jean-Baptiste Mondino's video for the song is also a delight. My copy has a worn & torn pic...